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Saturday, 18 April 2015

Those of us who were brought up in
monolingual homes may feel rather unsettled about how to deal with
little multilinguals in the family. This is the case even if we are
multilinguals ourselves, because the key words here are bring up
and home: it’s one thing to be multilingual, and quite
another to nurture multilingual children.

One common reason driving parents to
raise their children multilingually relates to the languages used by
each parent, and so to the languages that are relevant to each side
of the family. Parents are likely to want their children to be able
to talk to grandparents, little cousins, and other big and small
relatives and friends in those relatives and friends’ own
language(s), which may well be a single one, thereby adding the benefit of engaging relatives and friends in the process of making the
children theirs, too.

This means nurturing children to feel
at home in distinct linguistic and cultural environments. Although
there is no fundamental difference between doing this and raising
children to become linguistically and culturally appropriate in
distinct monolingual environments,
as all parents do, many of us remain persuaded that we’re
navigating uncharted waters as soon as we start using multi- (or bi-)
prefixed words to refer to behaviours and uses of language, on the
belief that only such words refer to ‘diversity’.
On the related belief that multilingual/bilingual children must
therefore remain forever partial strangers to each ‘mono-’ side
of a mixed family, well-meaning relatives and friends will scrutinise
the children’s linguistic and cultural behaviour for evidence
supporting this belief – and will, naturally, find it.

Words that “all other children know”
are missing, whereas the words that these children do know are used
and pronounced in funny ways. The multilingual nature of the
children’s linguistic creativity, language play,
child-speak,
or plain, typical, nonsensical child gibberish, turns to evidence of
fluency in “other” languages, which “our” language
conspicuously lacks. Whatever the children do, or do not do, in
short, fails to match standard behaviour associated with the monolinguals in the family.
And, of course, any perceived deviation in the children’s ways of
expressing themselves is immediately attributed to their ‘multi-’ status:
the children’s desired well-being (read: conformity to familiar
mono-prefixed standards) is being threatened by their parents’
bizarre (read: multi-) linguistic choices.

The colourful variety of opinions on
raising children in any family, pitting mums against dads, parents
against grandparents, and so on, finds itself compounded in
multilingual families, particularly where the languages and customs
of each side are mutually unintelligible. Sharing a grandchild (or
cousin, or friend) with ‘foreigners’ and their
Foreign-Speak may feel like an intrusion on ourterritorial rights to people,
spawning anything from bewilderment to mild conspiracy theories. In
my family, for example, we had Swedish relatives gape in awe at their
realisation that our toddlers could inflect Portuguese verbs (see
Chapter 7 of my book Three is a Crowd?
for more on this): “They must be so gifted for languages,
everyone knows how difficult Portuguese inflections are!”, with no
mention of the equally ‘difficult’ Swedish inflections that the
children were also producing at the same ages. And we had Portuguese
relatives frown at me when I failed to react to the children’s
addressing, in English, a slice of bolo inglês (which
translates properly as ‘fruit cake’, though literally as ‘English
cake’) on their plate: “Why don’t you tell them to speak
Portuguese in Portugal?”

Both sides of the family winced, in
other words, at the suspicion that their own flesh and blood might
well belong to alien hordes instead.

“Do you really mean to force the poor
things to speak so many languages?” or “Shouldn’t you have a
doctor check out their gobbledygook?” became standard questions to
us parents. They were asked with unmistakable signs of distress,
often in the presence of the gobbledygook-speakers themselves, and
apparently with no thought of how adult uneasiness might reflect on
the children’s behaviour, thus self-fulfilling the expectation of
‘strangeness’.

Concerns such as these appear to me to
draw on subtractive conceptions of multilingualism, where different
languages compete in a zero-sum game, and where, therefore, more than
one language doesn’t mean ‘more than one language’ but ‘many partial languages’.
Multilingual children naturally mix
both their languages and their cultures, but mixes are taken are
evidence of gaps in particular languages, rather than the token of healthy multilingualism
that they are.

Parents must of course use some
language to rear their children. If we stop to think for a while that
multilingualism is as typical
as monolingualism, rather than a manifestation of linguistic
‘otherness’, we’re likely to conclude that, really, what could
be more natural than using with our children the languages that matter
to our respective families? There are no aliens descending on any of
us after all: raising multilingual children in traditionally
monolingual environments is simply a different way of being
different in those environments. Differences of this kind may
sometimes feel overwhelming, because so many of us have been
persuaded that being multilingual is a headline-deserving novelty.
But is it? That’s what I ask next time.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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